> As one source explained, the mad stone was "...so constructed with its innumerable cells that when applied to the lacerated flesh, it adheres at once and every cell exercises a suction power, but does not absorb any substance except Virus; because the cells are too diminutive in size to take in even blood, which is too coarse and tough to gain entrance."
reminds me of having to take activated charcoal for stomach troubles
iirc the mechanism was that, since the surface area of the porous charcoal was greater than your stomach lining by an order of magnitude (and since entropy pushes concentration towards the mean), it was basically like eating a sponge and having it soak up everything, including a large volume of whatever is irritating your stomach, so your body's defenses can focus on whatever is left
Youtube recently gave me this neat video about an obscure historical aspect of rabies, the dreaded "phoby cat", a species of animal one time believed to be born rabid and 'patient zero' for all other rabies infections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-xcVS1mt48
I first found this channel from Tom Scott's newsletter. He's pretty good at storytelling, so I'll not spoil more of it.
MY first thought was a pretty morbid one: hit them over the head with a big enough stone hard enough, and they won't be infecting anyone with rabies anymore. A radical "cure", but would have (since rabies in humans is almost certainly deadly once symptoms appear) ultimately worked better than what the article describes...
> hit them over the head with a big enough stone hard enough, and they won't be infecting anyone with rabies
According to Wikipedia there are no documented cases of human to human transmission by biting, and the only recorded cases of transmission from one human to another were inadvertent via organ transplant.
So the stone was supposed to be boiled in milk right? And then applied to the wound? Since they mention cauterization as an alternative treatment, could the benefit come simply from applying a boiling-temperature stone to the wound?
Cauterization would have to be applied immediately to have any chance of working.
However, another mechanism comes to mind that would permit the existence of madstones: Note that they were often organic in nature and note the milk bit. I'm thinking of some very heat tolerant bacteria living in the material, boiling it in milk will give it a nutrient-rich liquid basically devoid of other pathogens. Suppose said bacteria exhibits a surface antigen matching some part of the rabies virus?
You can make a vaccine by exhibiting the target structure on a harmless pathogen. (Case in point, Sputnik V. It's not usually done because such a vaccine also makes the patient immune to the vaccine--Sputnik V primary dose and booster dose were separate things because of this.) And how does a bacteria come to exhibit this? There's plenty of viral code embedded in our DNA, the same thing could happen to a bacteria.
While this is obviously a low-probability scenario I don't see that it can be ruled out. There are an awful lot of pathogens out there that don't cause obvious symptoms and thus have never been studied. (Sometimes they cause non-obvious symptoms, though--think of HPV and cancer for the well-known case but there are others. Personally, I suspect that we have only scratched the surface on this.)
At the very least there was a psychological and social effect. Rabies is frightening, and every time you get bitten by an animal you're going to assume it was rabid, so in an era before the vaccine existed, rather than telling the patient "that animal probably wasn't actually rabid", you might as well put your mind at ease by performing the ritual.
This is a bit like cutting off your nose after being infected with Covid. It doesn't help, its already in your bloodstream. If any of that, helped even a little, we'd be doing it modernity too.
The more popular 19th century technique was to cut out all the flesh from that area, which didn't work either. Amputations were done too, but those didn't work. Our modern understanding is that the success stories were because the person never contacted rabies in the first place.
Rabies is a great argument against pet ownership, which would have vastly cut down on urban rabies as they came almost exclusively from feral dogs.
Also this article sort of plays down how desperate and non-sensical rabies treatments have been through history. It opens up this pandering narrative of "what if this stone worked somehow?" But its just as false as any other treatment. Sadly, these treatments were signs of desperation. It must have been horrific to be bitten before modern medicine. Even sadder, the patients who didnt respond to miracle cures were murdered by the staff trying to cure them, which seemed to be the only "real" treatment. Adults and children were murdered in cold blood by these "healers." Regardless of the ethics of rabies treatments and euthanasia, this is still murder due to the legalities and the arbitrary decision when to kill the patient. These people were killed often without explicit notification and approval of law, family, etc. It was just something that was allowed and when family dropped off their sick there, it was assumed they'd never see them again. The killings were brutal. Adults and children shoved between two mattresses as staff held them down so they asphyxiated. Or stabbed and left to bleed out.
There poor souls were essentially dropped off to "healers" who tortured them and murdered them when the tortures didn't work.
I imagine the stone was popular because your other alternatives were extremely gruesome.
This paper goes into the historic treatments and is interesting to read:
Prevention and treatment otherwise made no significant progress. Medical or surgical management delineated in Ancient Greece or Rome became increasingly tinted with religion. In Europe a miracle cure was deemed to be found at several specialized religious sites [51], such as the church of the village of Andage, renamed Saint-Hubert, where Louis I the Pious, one of Charlemagne’s sons and his successor, authorized the transfer of the eponymous saint’s thighbones in 826 CE. This abbey located near Liège, Belgium became a specialized center for rabies prevention. At the time, prevention before a bite took the form of applying a white-hot Key of Saint Hubert to dogs so they would not contract the disease [52,53]. An example of this amulet can be seen at http://www.webcitation.org/6os1x82Ty. Contrary to what was practiced in other reputed sites such as San Bellino [17], near present-day Rovigo in Italy, or in Saint-Tügen’s chapel in Primelin, France, this method must have been considered too cruel or too unreliable in humans bitten by suspected rabid animals. In humans, the preferred method of rabies prevention after a bite was based on incision of the forehead and implantation of threads from the Saint’s supposedly miraculous stole, accompanied by prayers and fasting [19,25,52,53,54]. In spite of Ambroise Paré—who after the siege of Turin in 1536 discontinued the practice of cauterization to heal wounds [55,56]—Dioscorides’ and Celsus’ cauterization approach remained widespread in the management of rabies risks well into the 19thC [31,57]. This may be because cauterization was performed to inactivate a “poison” and perhaps also because their work was never lost to practitioners in Europe in spite of the fall of the Roman Empire [58,59]. Patients, however, found little recourse should prevention fail: at Saint-Tügen chapel, patients with declared rabies were stifled between mattresses until the beginning of the 19thC.
The understanding of post-bite rabies prevention in animals or in humans, however, still made no progress. Published on 17 June 1684, the first edition of Medicina Curiosa, the first English-language journal wholly dedicated to medicine, describes post-exposure prevention failure in a suspected human case of rabies acquired from a cat [89]. “Treatment” after a bite remained faith-based [90] or otherwise fanciful, based for example on applying hair of the biting dog (“hair of the dog”) to the wound [28,66] or omelets flavored with “dog-rose root” (Rosa canina or cynorrhodon, as already suggested by Pliny the Elder in the 1stC CE) [91,92,93,94,95]. The same was true outside Europe [96]. Suggested therapies—some even based on homeopathic approaches—were rightly criticized as ineffective [97]. The fact that rabies is not transmitted in all cases even after the bite of an evidently rabid dog or wolf contributed to the illusion that each of the many preventive “treatments” had been effective.
These are all too easily disparaged as ludicrous recommendations made by self-assured and pompous clinicians, steeped from old-wives’ remedies. They are, however, sure signs of desperate and all-out efforts by health providers of the time to save their patients from what to this day remains an intractable disease. Vigorous approaches continued to be used well into the mid-19thC: In 1830s London, children bitten by potentially rabid dogs still underwent surgery or cauterization of the wound [57] (still discussed by Babes in 1912 [72]). Patients with clinically declared rabies were plunged into cold water or hot oil as recommended by Celsus [31,86], or were later euthanized by being stifled between mattresses or made to bleed to death [17,90,98,99].
> If any of that, helped even a little, we'd be doing it modernity too.
Rabies vaccines can be taken post-exposure, so no, we wouldn't.
Actually that makes me consider another possibility.. what if the stone does something similar to a vaccine? From what I understand the issue with rabies is that the immune system doesn't realize anything is wrong and so doesn't mount a response until it's too late. But vaccines have some property that makes it target the vaccine and thus the virus in an early stage. Maybe somehow intentionally inflecting trauma kicks the immune system into overdrive causing it to respond earlier? Or maybe the heat somehow deactivates or denatures the virus so that whatever it does to inhibit the immune system is disabled. I believe certain variolation protocols did use various primitive ways of disabling or weakening the pox virus.
Yes maybe this is all speculative wishful thinking... But if people swore by the method I do want to kinda give it the benefit of the doubt.
We also swore by exorcisms and beating children half toe death to "teach them a lesson." In fact, in MANY parts of the world today the preferred treatment for things like schizophrenia is exorcism. I argued with someone from a poor country on reddit over this recently. It was depressing and wild to hear someone defending exorcism as a normal thing.
Tradition is usually irrational, oppressive, and abusive, especially towards vulnerable groups like sick people, children, women, minorities, LGBTQ peoples, etc.
I think the reason it seemed effective was the very low number of actual rabies cases. Rabies had (and still has, to a degree) a big shadow. It’s a SCARY disease, and everyone knew about it, but it was also very rare. Whenever people got bit by a dog they were probably worried, but they also probably weren’t very good at telling the difference between an aggressive dog and a rabid dog. In the article, the farmer’s neighbors “quickly concluded that the dog was probably rabid”, but I wouldn’t assume they arrived there by purely rational means.
Then look at the “rules” for the mad stone. It can’t be sold (so doctors or scientists couldn’t buy one and test it), and if you apply it to an animal it will stop working (so you can’t test it on animals). The rules keep it from being tested. Mad stones were a comfort blanket.
I don’t think this was deliberately cooked up as a way of tricking people - if so, why not charge for it? I think there were a lot of remedies that didn’t work, and the one that happened to fit the societal need of “something to comfort the large number of dog bite victims who were scared shitless that they might have rabies” (while not being easily falsifiable) survived.
reminds me of having to take activated charcoal for stomach troubles
iirc the mechanism was that, since the surface area of the porous charcoal was greater than your stomach lining by an order of magnitude (and since entropy pushes concentration towards the mean), it was basically like eating a sponge and having it soak up everything, including a large volume of whatever is irritating your stomach, so your body's defenses can focus on whatever is left